Your logic is perfect here VG. I guess i am lucky...I seem to be aging similarly to each of these two gents. I have loved each of Weller's last 5 records and tours. But, i surely understand his stylings are perhaps NOT to everyone's taste. I imagine the same with LOOK NOW. To each his own...enjoy what you enjoy.

P.S. the BOWIE song on TRUE MEANINGS is truly other worldly, both lyrically snd sonically.

Elvis Costello Explains His Songwriting Secrets“I haven’t got a lot of time for the false snobbery of hipster music of any kind,” Costello says

The new episode of our podcast, Rolling Stone Music Now, features an extended interview with Elvis Costello, who just released Look Now, his first album in five years. Costello talks about mortality, working with Paul McCartney and learning from Bruce Springsteen, as well as the evolution of his band and his songwriting over the years. To hear the entire discussion, press play below or download and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.

Why swapping out one member — Davey Farragher joined on bass in 2001, replacing the Attractions’ Bruce Thomas — made the Imposters a different band altogether.“The Imposters is a different group than the group I started out with. We have strengths in different areas than that first group, because obviously the three of us that have played together for forty years should’ve learned something, you know? We should have gathered some things and maybe put aside some other qualities of music that seemed all important when we started out. If you just stay with the same playbook, it wouldn’t be very interesting, and Davey brings a lot of different things to it, because he’s a guy who plays with a predominantly rhythmic feel. He can still come up with nice melodic inventions, but that isn’t his main thing. It’s the groove, and he’s a great singer – it’s arguable whether I was a singer early on.”

On Painted From Memory, Costello’s classic 1998 album with Burt Bacharach, and his continuing collaboration with Bacharach“They weren’t big commercial hits, but people know those tunes nonetheless – ‘God Give Me Strength.’ I Still Have That Other Girl,’ ‘This House is Empty Now,’ and ‘Toledo,’ those particularly. I think the songs that Burt and I wrote on this record are very different. They don’t stretch over such a wide musical compass; they’re much more intimate. The two, ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘Photographs Can Lie,’ are entirely his music. I was in a sort of puzzle of how to resolve ‘He’s Given Me Things’ and he suggested a change to the third stanza which changes the harmony, which sort of made that into some kind of bridge, and that allowed us to sustain this sort of slightly claustrophobic music. If we didn’t have that shift that he suggested it perhaps wouldn’t have been as strong a piece. That’s one of my favorite pieces on the record.”

On being inspired to write 1980’s “Temptation” at a Bruce Springsteen show“Bruce has got all of this mythology, and then I saw him in Nashville [in 1978] when all of that really had traction… I could see a trap that was being laid, and I suppose that’s as close to writing songs about the predicament of the performer as I did earlier on. I remember I wrote a few songs about what I’d observed around my dad. [1986’s] ‘Suit of Lights’ was inspired by watching my dad play around the clubs and this sort of loneliness and the presumption of the audience and the lack of respect, ’cause it’s still a working job! You’re still doing a job! You don’t come up to somebody and go ‘You see that pencil there? I’m going to knock it out of your hand. Now how good are you at writing?’ Nobody does that to you, and that’s not self-pity. I’m just saying that it’s acknowledging that it’s still a job. There’s part of it that’s a job, and there’s the other part of it that’s massively over-rewarded.”

On the influence of his journeyman musician father“I don’t know. It does puzzle me that I knew so much about the workings of the business like from childhood. I could tell that there were people who were quite calculated. There were opportunities that came to my father that perhaps weren’t ones he should have taken. He was just trying to make a living, so I don’t judge anybody. I might’ve expressed strident opinions about things at different times about fashions of music. But in the long run, I tend to think, ‘Well you know, they’re just doing their job, whatever it is.’ I haven’t got a lot of time for the false snobbery of hipster music of any kind, whether it be jazz or rock and roll, because it’s just like, you don’t have the guts to try – that’s what it is, really. You’re holding yourself back because you think you’re going to be judged by some little chorus of people who couldn’t do what you’re doing anyway, so what does it matter?”

Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone Music Now, hosted by Brian Hiatt, on iTunes or Spotify, and tune in Fridays at 1 p.m. ET to hear the show broadcast live on Sirius XM’s Volume, channel 106.

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

The 50 Best Songs of 20182018, you were something. These are the songs that got us through the year.

(...)46. Elvis Costello, “Under Lime” Elvis Costello has always had a talent for writing songs that you feel with your whole body, and “Under Lime” might be his most orgasmic yet. Following up with the “Jimmie” we left “standing in the rain” on National Ransom, Costello delivers a peppy, poppy homage to an illicit backstage tryst between the older showman and the daffy young assistant on a low-budget “Mystery Guest” TV show. Costello’s vocals are satin-sinister, sweet as honey on one line and a dangerous purr in the next, and Pete Thomas’ clockwork drumming keeps everyone in check. But it’s Steve Nieve who steals the show with a ragtime piano that hits its frantic, fiery peak at the tail end of the last verse, and the song ends in a glorious shudder. I’m not ashamed to say I actually swooned when I heard him play it live this past November.(...)

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

Just joined the group. Thanks for approving me. Big EC fan and loving the new album. Very impressed to see such an impressive album so deep into a career. For me, the new album is up there with his best albums (the first five albums, Imperial, Painted, etc.). Wondering if others see the new album as a "top tier" EC album?

Sugar! Yes, absolutely top tier and I agree, 40+ years into a career and having a career equal, if not career best, is just such a lovely thing. Welcome. It is so interesting how a new arrival like this cascades back through the whole forty years, turning some songs into precedents, highlight this and that. Just like how, in a family tree, the next arrival is never just "one more" added on but opens up the whole lineage all over again.

La note de L'Express : 18/20.————————————————-Did Elvis Costello find the perfect song?After a five-year record silence, the English singer returns with "Look Now".

From an upbeat singer who began in 1977 to exploring the arcana of popular Anglo-Saxon music, Elvis Costello pursued the same quest: to write the perfect, irrefutable song. To this end, Declan Patrick MacManus, his real name, does not hesitate to rub his know-how to those of illustrious seniors - an album with Allen Toussaint in 2006, another with Burt Bacharah in 1998, which co-authored three of the titles of Look Now.

Look Now comes after five years of silence, an unusually long interval for such a prolific artist. The wait was worth it: Costello has assembled 12 jewels. Under Lime's entry, impresses with her energy, her opulent melody, the unpredictable arrival of a flurry of brass, just like Burnt Sugar is so Bitter (co-written by Carole King) and her chorus of female voices, which equals Big funk hours of Bowie.

Slow titles, just as fancy, are interposed with ease, such as the soul ballad Suspect my Tears, an impeccable classicism. The pen of the boy allows him to embody female characters (He's Given Me Things) as well as a nostalgic of the British Empire (I Let The Sun Go Down), the profusion of words always balancing with emotion some singing. Beatles, Brill Building, Broadway, Elvis Costello covers all terrains and delivers a masterful songwriting pop lesson for use by future generations.

The rating of L'Express: 18/20.

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

Sugar Mouse wrote:Just joined the group. Thanks for approving me. Big EC fan and loving the new album. Very impressed to see such an impressive album so deep into a career. For me, the new album is up there with his best albums (the first five albums, Imperial, Painted, etc.). Wondering if others see the new album as a "top tier" EC album?

Welcome.

Upper mid-tier for me. Everything from 77 to 86 except Almost Blue, Goodbye Cruel World and Punch the Clock are superior in my opinion, and I’d also place Painted From Memory, All This Useless Beauty and the underrated River in Reverse above it. I feel Look Now falls two strong songs short of that crop of albums.

Elvis Costello billed Look Now as a cross between his 1982 masterstroke, Imperial Bedroom, and his collaborations with songwriting impresario Burt Bacharach, but he undersold it. That’s because he’s grown into his music. So where Imperial Bedroom was the work of a precocious 20-something, Look Now — with its jazzy orchestrations and intellectual turns of phrase — reflects Costello’s true, earned world-weariness. He narrates the story of a letchy singer on the Beatlesesque “Under Lime,” he’s a scorned woman in love on the soulful “Unwanted Number” and he keeps a stiff upper lip in the face of sadness on the Motown-influenced “Suspect My Tears.” Bacharach and Carole King co-wrote a couple of tunes with him, and the production is tight and nuanced, making it the sort of record he always aspired to.

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

In October, Elvis Costello released “Look Now,” his first album in five years, returning to sophisticated pop along with his band The Imposters (basically the Attractions with a different bassist).

In the album’s press release, Costello nailed the content of “Look Now”: “I knew if we could make an album with the scope of ‘Imperial Bedroom’ and some of the beauty and emotion of (his Burt Bacharach collaboration) ‘Painted From Memory,’ we would really have something.”

And, indeed, he has something — the gorgeous piano ballad “Don’t Look Now,” one of three Bacharach co-writes, slipping in next to the urgent groove of “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter,” a Carole King co-write; the rhythm-rooted rocker “Unwanted Number” next to the horn, backing vocals and string-drenched “I Let The Sun Go Down,” a tune about the decline of the British Empire next to the funky “Mr. & Mrs. Hush.”

That’s just a brief tour through about a third of a Costello classic that, to be honest, mostly revisits old sounds and styles rather than breaking any new ground, as he attempted on 2013’s team up with The Roots, “Wise Up Ghosts.”

What “Look Now” doesn’t include is anything resembling an early Elvis rave-up. That’s not to say there aren’t some rockers — the opener, “Under Lime,” really packs a punch, albeit not at 150 beats per minute.

That’s perhaps both appropriate and inevitable. Costello’s now 64 and a cancer survivor, a pretty good jump from the angry young man of the '70s.

But no rave ups isn’t some kind of scathing critique of “Look Now,” which is a lovely record that fits, as Costello predicted, alongside the classic “Imperial Bedroom” as a sophisticated pop masterwork.

1. Elvis Costello & the Imposters, “Look Now” (Concord)There are other Rock & Roll Hall of Famers who are Costello’s songwriting equal — blokes named Bob and Bruce come to mind — but none who’ve maintained such a consistently high level of lyrical and melodic invention over four decades or more. As a record-maker, Costello had pretty much skipped out on quality studio time for the last 10 of those 40 years, focusing instead on touring and still-unproduced stage musicals. But now that he’s back in album mode, all those detours factor into what makes “Look Now” great, from the detailed theatricality of the storytelling to the well-honed precision and swing of the Imposters’ playing. He’s getting Bacharach-to-basics here, in a way — Burt co-wrote three tracks, and it feels like he was a spiritual advisor on some others — but the band’s presence makes it much less genteel than “Painted from Memory.” Think peak-era Dionne Warwick with sharper teeth and a savvy, rocking pit band, and you’ll have an idea of how much sophisticated fun Costello’s comeback is.

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

The Best Rock Albums of 2018(...)Elvis Costello and the ImpostersLook Now

Elvis Costello’s work in the past several years has been hit and miss, but his first Imposters album in a decade features both pristine production and his best songwriting in recent memory. He’s always had one of rock's best voices, and these songs serve his instrument particularly well. Whether he’s crooning theatrical Burt Bacharach co-writes or belting big-tent rock stompers, Look Now is a portrait of an icon holding court. –Evan Minsker

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.

Look Now’, Elvis Costello’s first solo album in eight years, was an excellent outing for the veteran songwriter that demonstrated his distinctive talent for writing complex narratives full of emotional jeopardy and black humour. It was also music that was keen to please, and while it got a little close to Steely Dan-style yacht rock (Under Lime and Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter, for example), this is a musical group with enough self awareness to maintain a degree of edge. Listen out for Steve Nieve’s distinctively tacky organ sound, which occasionally shows up. It sounds as incongruously crap/compelling today as it did on early work like Watching the Detectives and Pump It Up. // Jacob Brookman

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.